Ask: What would you do/make if you never had to monetize it? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask: What would you do/make if you never had to monetize it?

#131

Post by gcv » Sat, Mar 22, 2008, 6:31 AM UTC

I want to work on two things.

1. Technological improvements for human vision. I have a very special friend who lost vision in one eye because of a detached retina and the failure of ophthalmology to repair it and rewire it to the optic nerve. I want to help her, and other people in the same predicament.

2. Energy. Clean, renewable, highly efficient energy is the most important problem humans have to solve today (IMO). The usual suspects of solar, wind, waves, and "clean" biofuels only make economic sense because of government subsidies, and that situation stinks. We need radically new ideas.

Re: Ask: What would you do/make if you never had to monetize it?

#132

Post by strey » Sat, Mar 22, 2008, 7:22 AM UTC

strey wrote: post #104

LostInTheWoods wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

an ice-cream shop would be neat too

a candy store! with all kinds of crazy inventive candy! With a big gingerbread house just for you:)

I guess he never read Hansel and Gretel.

The candy store would be really cool, IMO. Has anyone ever read Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? Of course you've read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. If I ever did a startup, the whole point would be to earn enough money to open something like that, or maybe a toy company. I'd want enough money that I wouldn't have to bow to market forces and could make candy and toys that are actually good (Lego RIP).

Re: Ask: What would you do/make if you never had to monetize it?

#133

Post by derefr » Sat, Mar 22, 2008, 7:42 AM UTC

antiismist wrote: post #13

The "free" facebook. - no ads, period - all personal info is held under the watchful eye of a seperate, non-profit org that ensures no personal info is ever shared with third parties - you can delete your own account whenever you want, and you won't get hassled. An actual deletion of your data, too - all source code is open source, and people can contribute whatever features they want

How do you delete your data when "your" data is mostly other people's relationships to you? For just one obvious problem, other people "own" messages you post to their wall (they get the deletion rights to them, not you.) It's like deleting yourself from others' e-mail archives or RSS feeds--just doesn't make much sense.

Re: Ask: What would you do/make if you never had to monetize it?

#134

Post by derefr » Sat, Mar 22, 2008, 7:48 AM UTC

andr wrote: post #6

a social network for fictional people. like facebook except you don't have to feel guilty when you lie about everything

I wrote one of these at one point; I called it Persona. Its target audience was authors, tabletop RPG players, and people who like both soap operas and virtual pets. The main interaction was a sort of interview where users submitted to a pool of questions, then characters (to which each user had a one-to-many relationship) volunteered answers for them--I entitled it "Phase 1: Direct Characterization."

Phase 2 would obviously character interaction, but I never got to that point.

Re: Ask: What would you do/make if you never had to monetize it?

#135

Post by derefr » Sat, Mar 22, 2008, 7:59 AM UTC

falsdf20293 wrote: post #85

A better wikipedia. One where every article is cryptographically signed by the author and there is only ONE author. Articles are then user moderated up or down like here. I also wouldn't exclude anything and would allow articles of any length and detail. I imagine the end result would be something very much like wikipedia as the community would vote wikipedia-like articles to the top. But vandalism would be impossibl…

As long as there can be group and "public/everyone" keys, I'm sold. That is, one "user" could in fact be a single user, or it could represent a collaboration between any number of known or unknown users. (Even if you don't like it, people would still manage to do it this way somehow. May as well make it easy to exchange/publish keys to other users on the site.)

Alternately, one could sign a modification of an article rather than the article itself, allowing for one of the greatest benefits of Wikipedia: the three thousand pedants correcting everyone else's spelling, grammar, punctuation and word usage.

Re: Ask: What would you do/make if you never had to monetize it?

#136

Post by strey » Sat, Mar 22, 2008, 8:00 AM UTC

strey wrote: post #112

mixmax wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't meant to pander anybody - it was merely stating an opinion...

Ah, good point. On another note, people who vote on HN are the smartest people in the world. That's my opinion.

Apparently the voters disagree.

Re: Ask: What would you do/make if you never had to monetize it?

#137

Post by jauco » Sat, Mar 22, 2008, 8:01 AM UTC

andreyf wrote: post #126

falsdf20293 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the almost exact same idea, I also wanted to automatically convert any website into a torrent. It would be P2P browsing and the end of slashdotting small websites. Spikes in hits would not bring anyone down. But then I got a job at a biotech startup.

Another solution to this idea is FreeNet, but it doesn't seem to be catching on as well as the creators had wished: http://freenetproject.org/

I talked to some people who wrote code for it a while back, and it's actually a lot more important than us western-free-state-inhabitants might think. Over 50 % of the world has more or less of a dictatorship, and that estimate was not including russia. Dictatorships imply no free press, not even free face to face communication. No knowledge of how the government works. A continuous filter in the back of your head that judges whether you'll get into trouble for saying what you say.

Freenet not only guarantees load balancing, but more importantly untracability of file storage and originator.

Re: Ask: What would you do/make if you never had to monetize it?

#138

Post by icky » Sat, Mar 22, 2008, 8:18 AM UTC

strey wrote: post #136

strey wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, good point. On another note, people who vote on HN are the smartest people in the world. That's my opinion.

Apparently the voters disagree.

Maybe they felt pandered-to? ;)

Re: Ask: What would you do/make if you never had to monetize it?

#139

Post by SwellJoe » Sat, Mar 22, 2008, 8:21 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #70

SwellJoe wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what Tsumobi were working on last time I talked to them (and the programming language part was already well under way).

Tsumobi was doing a platform for mobile apps last I talked to them (which was close to a year ago). Is the programming language + P2P network part of that project, or have they switched directions?

Yes, the language and P2P was part of it. The platform, it turns out, required a new language (don't ask me how that math works...but I saw the language with my own two eyes--sort of a Ruby/JavaScript hybrid running on the mobile JVM).

Re: Ask: What would you do/make if you never had to monetize it?

#140

Post by strey » Sat, Mar 22, 2008, 8:29 AM UTC

icky wrote: post #138

strey wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently the voters disagree.

Maybe they felt pandered-to? ;)

No, no, I'm just expressing an opinion, like mixmax. It's up to the voters whether they actually think they're so smart. For example, here is another opinion: icky is the best handle ever.